The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam

This is a study of Chinese Hui Muslim women's historic and unrelenting spiritual, educational, political and gendered drive for an institutional presence in Islamic worship and leadership: 'a mosque of one's own' as a unique feature of Chinese Muslim culture. The authors place the historical origin of women's segregated religious institutions in the Chinese Islamic diaspora's fight for survival, and in their crucial contribution to the cause of ethnic/religious minority identity and solidarity. Against the presentation of complex historical developments of women's own site of worship and learning, the authors open out to contemporary problems of sexual politics within the wider society of socialist China and beyond to the history of Islam in all its cultural diversity.

Shui Jingjun Shui, Maria Jaschok

Acknowledgements, Division of Labour, List of Maps and Tables, Illustrations, Abbreviations, Collective Preface, PAR T I: Introduction, PAR TIl: From the Margins of Memory, PAR T II I: Women's Mosques, Nu Ahong and their Religious Culture, PART IV: Claiming Heaven, PART V: Chinese Muslim Women: Communitas, Choices, and Conversion, Appendix I Profiles of Two Leading Women's Mosques and their Religious Leadership, Appendix II Nusi in the Repuhlican Era (1912-1949), Appendix III Questioning Hui and Han Women and Men on Quality of Life (Survey), Appendix IV Unpublished Documentation on Central China's Muslim Culture and Women's Lives (lodged with Henan Provincial Library, Zhengzhou, Henan Province), Glossary, Bibliography, Index